NEW YORK.

Manawatu Standard, Volume XLVIII, 23 January 1928, Page 8

NEW YORK.

CITY OP MARVELLOUS PROGRESS.

SKYSCRAPER APARTMENT

HOUSES,

From a private letter received by a Dunedin resident from a friend in New York, the Otago Daily Times was permitted to making the following interesting extract: — You would hardly recognise New York if you were to visit it now —so many skyscrapers and residences have gone up in the last two or three years, our building trades have been at the top notch, and this is not only taking place in Now York, but in Chicago, Detroit, and many other cities; but it complicates our traffic systems to have so many hundreds of thousands of people to transport from skyscrapers down town to the skyscraping apartmenthouses up town. I have been oil two traffic committees —one -of the Central Mercantile Association of which I am second vice-president, and tho other the Eighth Avenue Association, and the complexity of the situation makes your head swim, and it is getting worse 1 by the minute. Very many of the office buildings down town turn out 10 000 people at the same hour every day, and many of the apartments they go to have 5000 or over living within their walls. The Eighth Avenue Subway will bo completed in two' years. It has been building now about three years, and as Manhattan is almost solid rock, it is a wonderful undertaking, and as is usual in such cases there are complications in arranging payments. \Uien New York first started subways* about 20 years ago the fare from place to place was five cents, but the traffic or length of line was less than five miles, lor which five cents was the charge. Now you can travel 25 miles or more on our subways for five cents, and the administration is trying to keep it down to five cents in order to “hold the voters in line, and are asking the surrounding property-holders to pay the rest, which means that every passenger costs from seven to eight cents to transport, and it cannot be done as a legitimate business, so it is put on to tho taxpayers in the neighbourhood of the subways, of which there are now from 200 to 300 miles , and still going on. As to the autos and tho street it is worse in fact, it is most surprising that many people are not killed every day, but the Our traffic policemen do good work. We have just opened a vehicular tunnel from down-town to the Jersey shore. It is a magnificent piece of engineering and architecture, and while there was some doubt about tho ventilation, it is perfect. We are now working for two more vehicular tunnels further up town. Tho one just opened took over seven years to build, and is subject to toll, and will pay for itself in a few years. A bridge is starting now from New York, 178th Street to the Jersey side, which, as I understand it, will have the highest and longest span in the world.